American startup disrupting Japanese sushi industry

This Week in Startups episode 783: Jason speaks with Finless Foods co-founder and CEO Mike Selden about how his company produces real fish meat from stem cells, the increasing scarcity of healthy and affordable seafood, more

Finless Foods looks very interesting and promising to me, but at the same time the existence of this startup concerns me being a native Japanese loving sushi so much.

This kind of innovation should happen within Japan, a country surrounded by sea and lived with it for long time, not America. Looking at it from different angle, what we are seeing here is a American startup disrupting Japanese sushi industry.

I’m not talking about Japan vs the rest of the world or anything like that. I’m talking about Japanese government and Japanese startups only trying to ‘rescue’ the people in fishing industry either by pouring millions of dollars of grants into the industry or partially automating the process where human used to do with the help of IT and robotics. Needless to say, both are not considered true innovation.

I’m based out of Kyoto, and we have a top-notch stem cell scientists at Kyoto University which is known as the driving force behind a Nobel prize winning iPS (induced pluripotent stem cell) technology.

Why aren’t we seeing a startup like this here? Should I convince someone to do that? Should I make an angel invest into the startup working on a similar topic and turn around? Or, am I the one who is supposed to get it done myself?

Hmm. There are so many things to work on, but I got a single life to spend. Life is too short indeed.